The Langston Hughes House - 20 East 127th Street

 

photograph by Americasroof

Four years after the end of the Civil War, pioneering developers were beginning to transform Harlem from country estates and farms to an attractive suburb.  Two of them, James Meagher and Thomas Hanson, erected two 20-foot-wide, three-story homes on East 127th Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues in 1869.  Designed by Alexander Wilson, their Italianate design was handsome, but unexceptional.  Throughout the city, similar rows of nearly identical homes were being constructed, their monotonous appearance sometimes befuddling inebriated homeowners who could not find their own house.

Like its neighbor, 20 East 127th Street was clad in brownstone.  A high stone stoop rose to the double-doored entrance below an arched pediment supported by elaborately carved corbels.  The segmentally arched openings sat within molded architraves and a bracketed pressed metal cornice crowned the design.

The house became home to the Walter C. Palmer, Jr. family.  A printer, publisher, author and bookseller, he and his wife, Mary G., had at least one child, Mamie, born in 1867.

Palmer's business focused on religious topics.  Several of the works he published were related to the American Holiness Movement, co-founded by his mother, evangelist and author Phoebe Palmer.  (The movement stressed the doctrine of John Wesley, called "Christian perfection.")  He not only published Phoebe Palmer's works, but in 1869-70 he co-edited The Guide to Holiness Magazine with her.

In 1874, Mamie Palmer contracted scarlet fever.  The seven-year-old died on March 25 and her funeral was held in the parlor two days later.

The Palmers left West 127th Street by 1876 and No. 20 became home to Alexander Gaw and his unmarried daughter, Louisa.  Gaw's wife, the former Elizabeth Campbell, had died at the age of 65 on November 9, 1874.  Alexander Gaw was in the paint business and was, additionally, a trustee of the West Side Savings Bank.  

The parlor was the scene of another funeral in 1880.  Louisa Gaw died on October 18 and her funeral held here on the 21st.

In May 1886, an advertisement offered 20 East 127th Street for rent.  It described it as a "Three story brown stone House, good order, to let; nine hundred dollars."  The figure would translate to about $31,800 per year today.

The house was leased by E. Jeanrenaud, who converted it to The Harlem Collegiate School.  The private boys' school accommodated 30 students including six "boarding pupils."

The Nation, September 1, 1887 (copyright expired)

The venture was short lived and on September 14, 1889, an advertisement in the New-York Tribune announced the opening of the Mount Morris School, headed by Frank Clifford Lyman and George B. Towle.  The ad said in part:

In the resolve to have a school of telling merit, the principals rely on the highest standards, enthusiastic interest, liberal recitation methods and advanced methods.  The start in Classics a specialty.

Frank Clifford Lyman and his family occupied space on the upper floors.  The ad said, "A school home of rare advantages is offered to a very few boys in the principals' household."  Only three boys were accepted as boarding students.

Frank Clifford Lyman would continue to operate The Mount Morris School in the house into the mid-1890s.  It became home to the Nussbaum family at the turn of the century, and to Dr. John Staunton Blackmar by 1906.

Born in Connecticut in 1874, Blackmar graduated from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1898 and served in the Spanish-American War as a first lieutenant and Assistant Surgeon in the Third Connecticut Voluntary Infantry

Dr. John S. Blackmar in his military uniform.  (original source unknown)

He became associated with Harlem Hospital in June 1900 and by the time he moved into 20 East 127th Street was doing clinical work in the Harlem Hospital Dispensary.  It was likely his marriage to Mildred Martin in 1910 that ended his residency here.

Edward Goldschmidt, who owned 20 East 127th Street, continued to lease the house.  From 1910 to 1914 it was home to Reverend Edward H. Cleveland of the New York Protestant Episcopal City Mission Society.  The American Church Almanac and Year Book said he was "Missionary to Riverside Hospital, North Brother's Island, and Branch Workhouse, Riker's Island."

A major change came when Edward Goldschmidt leased the house to Henry Riddle in August 1914.  He rented rooms in the upper portion and installed "the Funeral Parlors of Henry Riddle" in the lower floors.  Riddle operated the funeral home and chapel through the spring of 1920, when the Goldschmidt estate sold the house.

No. 20 East 127th Street saw a flurry of residents over the subsequent two decades.  Then in 1947, musician William Emerson Harper, his wife, the former Ethel "Toy" Dudley Brown, and poet Langston Hughes co-purchased the house for $12,500 (about $180,000 today).

Trumpeter W. Emerson Harper was known as much for his labor activism as for his music.  He routinely contributed articles to periodicals regarding the financial struggles of musicians.  

He and Ethel, a costume designer and seamstress, had become close friends of Langston Hughes in the 1930s.  At the time, Hughes was emerging as a significant writer and poet.  His first novel, Not Without Laughter, published in 1930, earned him the Harmon Gold Medal for literature.  His close relationship with the Harpers was evidenced by his dedicating his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea, to them.

Langston Hughes in 1942.  photograph by Cal Varn Vechten from the collection of the Yale University Library.

Hughes occupied the upper portion of the house.  Among the works he produced here were Shakespeare in Harlem in 1942; Montage of a Dream Deferred, published in 1951; a series of humorous books about character Jess B. Simple written from 1950 through 1965; and works about Black culture, like the 1952 The First Book of Negroes; the 1954 Famous American Negroes; and The Book of Negro Folklore, published in 1958.

Langston Hughes entered the Polyclinic Hospital for prostate surgery in the spring of 1967.  The operation was "apparently successful," according to the New York Amsterdam News, but complications developed.  He died on May 22 at the age of 66.  In reporting his death, newspapers nationwide lauded his work.  The San Francisco Chronicle, for instance, wrote:

A versatile and prolific writer, Hughes was equally fluent in the lyric voice of the poet, sharp-humored posturing and rhythms that echoed folk music and jazz, and the plaint of Simple, the Harlem philosopher who was his best known creation.

The Harpers remained in the house, transferring the title to their son, James Emerson Harper in 1980.  He sold it to Dr. Beverly Prince, an ear, nose and throat surgeon at Harlem Hospital, and her husband, Les Rolfe, five years later.

An automobile sits in front of the stoop of 20 East 127th Street in 1940.  via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services.

By the 2000s, the vintage brownstone house was showing significant deterioration.  In 2019, Brett Leggs, executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund of the National Trust of Historic Preservation, first visited the house.  Seven years, later, on March 19, 2026, The New York Times reported that Dr. Beverly C. Price and the National Trust "are undertaking a meticulous restoration of its timeworn exterior."

(In the meantime, the I, Too Arts Collection had occupied the top three floors from 2016 to 2019.  The group offered to buy the house, but, "Dr. Prince did not want to sell," said The New York Times.)

The ivy that covered the facade in this photograph damaged the surface of the brownstone.  photograph via 6sqft.com

The Times article explained that the restoration is also addressing the cast iron fencing and stoop railings, the brownstone (damaged from decades of clinging ivy), and roof repairs.

The James A. Reid House - 233 West 136th Street

 

In 1891 architect-developer Thomas Van Brunt designed an ambitious row of 32 stone-faced homes on the north side of West 136th Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues (today's Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Frederick Douglass Boulevards, respectively).  Among them was 233 West 136th Street which, like its neighbors, rose three stories above an English basement.

The Queen Anne design of the 16-foot-wide residence was highly influenced by Romanesque Revival.  Bullet-shaped newels introduced the high ten-step stone stoop.  Delicate carvings at the parlor level depicted swirling flowers and stylized potted plants.  Stained glass filled the transom of the parlor window.  The second and third floors took on a Romanesque personality with rounded columns that flanked the projecting bay, rough cut stone lintels at the second floor and arched eyebrows at the third.  The bay culminated in a dramatic pyramidal roof supported by a waffle-paneled entablature.

The keystone of the parlor window includes a charming potted plant.  Decorative carved panels at the sides straddle the lines of the homes on either side.

An advertisement on October 10, 1897 warned potential buyers that 233 West 136th Street was one of "only three left of the whole block," and touted its hard wood interiors.  It described the house as "Modern in every way."  Eight months later another ad pointed out "block strictly private."  Restricted blocks prohibited the incursion of businesses, thereby ensuring homeowners a quiet and private environment.

The house became home to Adelbert Hiram Steele.  He and his wife, the former Nellie M. Mahaffey, had two sons and a daughter.  Born in Meadville, Pennsylvania in 1845, Adelbert graduated from Meadville College and the Iron City College.  Originally a clerk in a general store, he became an expert telegraph operator.  That led to a job as a clerk in the Meadville Bank.  In 1864 he enlisted in the Union Army.  Following the war his career continued to rise.  He became president of a bank in Tidioute, Pennsylvania, and then president of the Pittsburgh, Chenango and Erie Railroad.

Steele relocated his family to New York around 1887.  By the time they moved to 233 West 136th Street, he had served as Deputy Commissioner of Public Works, was prominent in Republican politics, and was the receiver for the Gold Creek and Nevada Mining Company.  

On September 19, 1902 Steele attended the unveiling of the General Slocum memorial at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.   While there, he caught what the New-York Tribune described as "a severe cold."  He was still suffering a month later, but nevertheless spoke at a political meeting on 125th Street on October 14.  It was an ill-advised exertion and the following day he became ill and was confined to his bed.

Adelbert Hiram Steele died on October 22.  In reporting his death, the New-York Tribune gave him a rather back-handed compliment.  "Although peculiar in some of his ways and ideas in both business and politics, his fairness and honesty won him the respect of all who knew him."

The West 136th Street house next became home to the Peter McDowell family.  Like all the residents of the block, they maintained a domestic staff.  An advertisement in the New York Herald on October 26, 1907 read, "Wanted--Girl for general housework; three in family; reference."

The third member of the family mentioned in the ad was William R. McDowell.  He died on June 19, 1917 and his funeral was held in the parlor of 233 West 136th Street two evenings later.  The following year, in February 1918, Peter McDowell leased the home of Mary S. Donnelly at 412 West 149th Street and sold the 136th Street house to James A. Watson.

Watson's residency would be relatively short.  He sold the property to James A. Reid in October 1921.  

Born in North Carolina, Reid was currently relocating his family to New York from Boston.  At the time the neighborhood was in the midst of what would be called the Harlem Renaissance, as it morphed into the center of Manhattan's Black community, arts and culture.  James and Julia Bowe Reid would quickly become respected members of the Harlem district.  By 1928 James was president of the Men's Guild of St. Martin's Church.  At some point Julia's widowed mother, Ella Bowe, came to live with the couple.

The Reids often had houseguests, many of them highly visible.  Living with them in November 1923 was poet Langston Hughes.  In his 1986 biography The Life of Langston Hughes, Arnold Rampersad writes, "Fresh from Africa, Langston glowed now in a special light; also, the August Crisis had devoted an entire page to his poems, including 'My People,' 'Three Poems of Harlem,' and the dazzling 'Jazzonia.'"

233 West 136th Street is behind the tree in this photo of the 1891 row.

On August 25, 1928, The New York Age reported, "Robert J. Buckner of Topeka, Kan., stopped in New York a few days ago enroute to England.  While in New York he was guest of Mrs. James A. Reed [sic] of 233 West 136th street.  Mr. Buckner will also visit South America before returning to the United States."

The following year, on October 5, 1929, the newspaper reported on the arrival in New York of J. H. Morford, noting "for almost 25 years [he] has been a teacher and independent missionary in Lagos, Nigeria, West Africa."  The article continued, "Mr. Morford brought with him his native wife, who is a beautiful and charming woman, and the largest collection of native African art in brass, ivory, wood-carving and leather-work that it has been this reporter's privilege to see."

Morford was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and his wife was educated in Leeds, England before returning to Nigeria to teach in the government schools.  The newspaper wrote, "They plan a lecture tour of Negro schools and colleges throughout the South.  While in New York, they are the guests of Mr. and Mrs. James A. Reid."

During the summer of 1929 the Reids opened their home to young women.  On August 3 The New York Age reported, "Young ladies spending the summer in New York, either working, studying or playing, and stopping with Mr. and Mrs. James Reid, 233 West 136th street, joined together as hostesses at one of the prettiest of the many gay summer parties which have been given."  The article noted that the Reid house "was attractively and appropriately arranged for the occasion."  

Julia Bowe Reid died in 1936.  As was common, the title of the 136th Street house was in her name.  Her will left it to James, with the condition, "that he permit my beloved mother, Ella Bowe, to reside therein for and during the remainder of her natural life."  There were other strings attached to James's inheritance.  Upon his death the house was to pass to Julia's granddaughter, Joan Bird.

James lived on in the house into the 1940s, at least.  It has escaped being converted to apartments, and although the brownstone front has been painted, it is greatly intact, including the stained glass and the original interior shutters at the parlor floor.

photograph by the author

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